The Taiwan based Chunghwa Telecom joins hands with China based China Telecom so as to cooperate with each other and facilitate the launch of Wi-Fi mobile internet roaming service.
Chunghwa Telecom stated that the increasingly popular adoption of smartphones and tablet computers coupled with the cross-strait communications and exchanges getting more frequent mean that the demands going to jump in terms of cross-strait voice and data roaming services. Earlier, Chunghwa Telecom was seen lowing voice roaming fees, in addition to offering data roaming choice based policies. As on August 2011, the network operator had also started offering Wi-Fi mobile Internet roaming services.
Data released by the Tourism Bureau of Taiwan, in 2010 revealed that there were as many as 2.42 million mainland visitors to Taiwan, representing an increase of 60% based on the figures in the previous year. Apparently, meeting the customers’ demands for mobile, fast, stable, and cost-effective Internet roaming service are the primary concerns of Chunghwa Telecom’s development of Wi-Fi roaming service with the Chinese mainland operator.
In addition, it has been announced by Chunghwa Telecom that Taiwan based users travelling to China mainland stand to take advantage of China Telecom’s Wi-Fi Internet service at the rate of $.31 per minute. Previously, the rate for international mobile Internet roaming was between $0.78 and $1.25 per minute.
Chunghwa Telecom has plans for setting up 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in the pipeline across Taiwan, before the close of this year. Meanwhile, China Telecom will provide preferential Wi-Fi service to its CDMA users. So far, China Telecom has developed 120,000 Wi-Fi hot spots while it plans to establish one million additional hot spots over the next three years.
